Common sense versus humor

When using social networks in everyday life, I constantly find myself thinking that this or that mechanism does not quite suit me. The brain sees inconvenience and glaring injustice and tries to think of something there. Sometimes funny thoughts are born in him. One of the last I want to share with the community.

Why is humor harmful to thematic social networks? Is it worth fighting with him? How to direct the vector of service development? Is it possible to add something new to the long-thought-out webdvanol mechanisms? How to insert a new idea into the old interface, so that there are no casualties?

And, most importantly, what the crap on the left is drawn?
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We are aware of the problem

Diligently sitting my pants on Habré, two weeks ago I discovered a user rating. That is, I knew about its existence, but this was before the lamp, and then suddenly indifference was replaced by interest. As I understand it, no one needs a rating here, but at the same time it is called upon to perform some important tasks. It seems that it displays the usefulness of each specific user for Habr. Seeing myself in a tough place, I came to some resentment and decided to rise a little.

Your rating increases if someone votes for your post or comment. Post - too lazy, so slowly but surely it was necessary to earn rating points with the help of comments. I think the majority of habracheloveks know that a good sparkling comment is capable of both 100 and 200 plus signs each. Well, I, by the way, seeing an interesting post, began to regularly release caustic remarks, although I had rarely dealt with such nonsense before. For two weeks, the rating increased by 1000 positions, and karma - by 5 votes (all positive). The main growth was made up of ridiculous statements.

Now, actually, to the point. It turned out that I became much more useful to Habra (according to the rating) without creating anything valuable. If it were Bash, there would be no questions, but Habr is a place where high-quality IT content is generated. But, intensively diluting useful information with malicious offtopic, I see, I am also encouraged by the system. Somewhat strange it turns out, is not it?

Whether the situation described is a Habra problem, I think the site owners will decide for themselves. I’m also worried about developing my own social network, and I don’t want to sacrifice useful content to fun.

Theorize

Let's try to figure out by what criteria we evaluate this or that material.

I could not make a long list, from which I would slowly cross out too much. Three criteria immediately appeared in my head: utility, relevance, and emotions. The peculiarity of the last point is that it considerably outweighs the previous two.

It is emotions that make us evaluate the most often. We ply under laughter, we minus under the exclamation: “This is a moron!” Of course, this is not done by everyone and not always, but, nevertheless, this is a mass phenomenon. And it seems to me that this phenomenon should be fought.

The reason for the fight is more than serious. You can realize it by reading the most rated comments to any topic. It is logical to assume that the most sensible comments from adequate people, expanding the view on the subject matter of the article, and not the jokes of humor from all sorts of clowns, will earn the most “pluses”. There is nothing like this in practice. Sensible comments are usually searched by volume, not by pluses. To put it mildly, this is inconvenient. The question is, what for do you need a voting system, if it is inefficient?

Is it possible, without any radical changes in people's minds, to reduce the share of emotional voices and shift the focus of attention to information that is really important for the site? How to redirect the activity from the creation of short-term content to the generation of something that will be useful in a year or two?

The topic in the blog actively lives one day, then it falls into the depths and is used only for reading, not for communication. A person who came from a search engine for something important to himself should see an article with sensible comments, and not a branch of Bashorg. If we correctly identify such comments, we will be able to highlight them in color and make the font larger to catch the eye.

So, the task is clear - you need to make a simple voting tool, taking into account the evaluation criteria, but not breaking the user's brain.

We are looking for a solution

We decided on three criteria, now we will try to formalize them. We will do things with emotions simply: since usually nobody in the comments tries to crush a tear, we’ll replace emotions with humor. It turns out the option "funny / bad joke." Relevance translate into "in point / offtopic", and utility - in the "interesting / nonsense."

Honestly, it seems tempting to combine relevance with the utility of one switch (interest), but not so simple. First, leaving interest with humor alone is dangerous. Secondly, sometimes in the comment threads interesting discussions unfold that have little to do with the topic of the article. So we will work with this trinity.

In general, we got three toggle switches, each of which has three positions: “+”, “-” and “neutral”. 26 variants of combinations (three “neutral” are excluded). Forcing the user to deal with such abundance is harmful. So simplify.

Suppose that there may be an assessment of the following nature: "an interesting, relevant remark with a silly joke." That is two plus and minus. But usually, emotions do not tear us apart, and we give some definite assessment: “like / dislike / don't care”. We will not consider the last option, because in this case the person does not vote.

Since we can give a very specific color to our assessment, we can eliminate the combination of pros and cons in one voice. That is, for the described option, you will need to clearly choose what is more important: “stupid joke” or “interesting and relevant replica”. With this approach, 14 different combinations of estimates are obtained. This is already real.

Positive ratings: "interesting", "to the point", "funny", "good addition", "joke in the topic", "funny offtopic" and "cool."

Negative ratings: “nonsense”, “malicious offtopic”, “bad joke”, “inappropriate humor”, “stupid and not funny”, “positive tupizm” and “drink a yadu”.

It remains to somehow portray and tie it to the site.

Invent a mechanism

Making it very simple and quite convenient. Next to the comment, we leave the already-normalized clickable plus and minus. When you click on the plus sign around it, the following interface pops up:

The colors indicate grades: blue - “to the point”, purple - “joke to the topic”, red - “funny”, yellow - “funny offtopic”, green - “interesting”, turquoise - “good addition”.

We can easily move the mouse and select the desired grade. And we can make one more click, and a neutral assessment of color will be selected. That is, users who are accustomed to ordinary polls will be able to do the same thing as before, but by double-click.

Clicking can be counted in different ways. It all depends on the specific developer. For example, a rating of "good addition" can be counted as 1 interest + 1 relevance, and you can as 0.5 interest + 0.5 relevance. The second option is closer to me.

Advantages and disadvantages

Let's start with the minuses. The system is only suitable for sites on which people live. This mechanism requires a certain habit, although it should not frighten inexperienced users. However, on the site, where people go for a short time, you should not put such a thing. The user votes longer, it can scare people away from the voting process itself. It becomes more difficult to analyze votes.

I see pluses much more tangible. And the main one is the automatic detection of some user data. We can understand whether a person has a sense of humor, in which area he is well versed, whether he is adequate. How to use this information, the developer can decide for himself. For example, it is possible to organize something like RPG and reward users with titles like “sullen programmer” or “fun clever”. It is possible, based on the preferences of a person, to highlight comments in different ways or, in general, to change the issue when searching. If you look at the question from the mercantile side, then you should think about who and what kind of advertising you need to show.

The second plus is where it all started, thematic content can be moved forward without looking at frivolous comments. And just the developer gets a new tool in their hands.

I have already made my choice and will definitely introduce something similar on my website when the time comes. And what habralyudi think about this concept?

PS If it's not difficult, let's try in the comments for this article to write our attitude to other statements using the terms described here. Experiment for. Only, I beg you, you should not spoil each other's karma, if suddenly the commentary rating is negative. This is just a test of ideas, treat business with humor and understanding. Thank you in advance.

PPS I repeat the terminology.
Positive ratings: "interesting", "to the point", "funny", "good addition", "joke in the topic", "funny offtopic" and "cool."

Negative ratings: “nonsense”, “malicious offtopic”, “bad joke”, “inappropriate humor”, “stupid and not funny”, “positive tupizm” and “drink a yadu”.